The Plough and the Stars // Review
A great live theatre experience requires a good story, emancipating dialogue, interesting characters, communication of the message and fringe benefits. The Plough and The Stars is a big production for any theatre; with a big cast, and four acts to guide the audience through, and the Irish Theatre Players' production was intimate and well-directed.
The ITP staged this play in the Dolphin theatre in 1982 and I played the part of Uncle Peter. As a result, I’m familiar with the work, and indeed with the author Sean O’Casey, who came from a Dublin working class protestant background. O’Casey was a socialist, who brought together the forces of socialist and patriotic revolutionaries in a classic work of quality theatre.
This production delivered a standard of theatrical experience you will be hard to find in community theatres. On entry you find yourself in Moore Street, surrounded by hawker stalls with fruit and vegetables, Irish baked bread, cakes and potato farls, minerals and crisps, and among it all a tea and coffee station, alongside raffle and programme vendors, and complimentary port. Having enjoyed the hospitality, you make your way to your allocated seat only to find a magnificent set awaits. You are facing a street of decaying Georgian houses, now tenements, occupied by the lower classes. During the play you are also allowed into the rooms of two of the tenant families; while also getting to experience the inside a public house close to the city centre where a public rally is being held.
Welcome to Moore Street!
This is 1915; Britain is at war and home rule for Ireland has been passed by the British Parliament but is deferred for the duration of the war. It is a time of social upheaval with workers striking for a fair deal. There is ambivalence towards British rule which has only had tacit acceptance after 500 years of occupation. But economic circumstances led to thousands of Irishmen joining the British army to fight for small nations. There was never support or recognition given to these men during or after the war. The play brings out the disparate arguments among the tenement neighbours who are fiercely proud of their dignity and hold strong opinions which are not held back and lead to colourful and verbose arguments and exchanges sometimes physical yet in all the hypocrisy they bind together when any fall victim to troubles.
Sean O'Casey's "The Plough and the Stars" is full of poetic, elaborative dialogue. The focus is on the Clitheroe family; the recently wed Jack and Nora, who share their rooms with Nora’s elderly uncle, Uncle Peter, and her cousin, the young socialist known as The Covey. Nora is rational and romantic and certain in her home duties. She has a quality of refinement but her sanity is severely tested as events develop over the next six months. Sandi Buckley brought that quality of inner strength and devotion that slowly turns to despair as her little world is shattered.
Nora (Sandi Buckley) and Jack (Brian Donohue)
Uncle Peter is a proud patriot of old, who is constantly mocked by the young Covey. The interaction of these characters played authentically by Joe Purcell and Rory Buckley provides moments of comedy and pathos. Covey rattles off socialist writings and theories impressively, but no-one he speaks to truly understands. He despises what he sees as the sham patriotism and hypocrisy all around him. He and Uncle Peter repel each other until tragedy inevitably brings them together.
Covey (Rory Buckley) and Uncle Peter (Joe Purcell)
Neighbour to the Clitheroes, Mrs Grogan (Siobhan Wright), has a teenage daughter Mollser (Katie Toner) who is dying of consumption. She has a heightened, pessimistic view of all she encounters, yet is somehow a welcome figure in all scenes. This is a credit to Siobhan’s portrayal of the character. Protestant neighbour, Bessie Burgess (Charlotte Weber), agitates all her neighbours with her disdain of the flare-up in patriotism taking place in Dublin, while her son fights on the front in the British Army. For all her antagonism and double standards she pays the ultimate price as the best of neighbours. As a non-Irish actor Charlotte gave her character, the outsider who is an insider, credibility.
Mollser (Katie Toner) with Nora
There are two level-headed peace makers in the story. First, is the affable Fluther Good (Stanley O’Neill), who arguably has some of the best lines in the show. When I played Uncle Peter I was too young for the part, but Joe and Stan know and live these characters well. Both are Dubliners, as is Siobhan Wright, and they understand the Dublinesque vernacular, motivations and behaviours of his sometimes caricature personalities. This is the mark of O’Casey, and his dialogue is a delight in the right voices.
Mrs. Gogan (Siobhan Wright) and Fluther (Stan O'Neill)
In Act II, we meet the second peace maker; Tom the Barman, played by John Flood. John pitches this role perfectly as a moderator removed from the proletariat. Amid all the chaos from the public rally outside the pub, and the gung-ho whiskey-fed bravado of the drinkers, the barman and his bar offer sanctuary from the troubles of the outside world. Spirits must have been cheap in 1915 judging by the liberal buying and shouting of drinks! Of course, Ireland had a wealth of distilleries until US Prohibition killed them off.
Barman Tom (John Flood)
Rosie Redmond (Michelle Delaney) is the city strumpet who sides with the argument of whoever is buying. She deserved our sympathy, but even more so had she been a little more common and rough. The pub scene offers more complexity for the characters, allowing us more time to get to know them. Fluther, who earlier swore off the drink, seems to have teetotally, and predictably, forgotten this pledge; and despite his "peacemaker" personality, he rolls up his sleeves when his own honour is offended. O’Casey uses this scene, even with such an important meeting as a backdrop and driver of the narrative, to illustrate the theatricality in the Dublin character. You see it today in political debate, and what better stage here than a public house.
Rosie (Michelle Delaney)
Act III takes us out onto the streets of Dublin; and into the insurrection of Easter 1916. Here, we listen to the contrary arguments between Mrs Grogan and Bessie about who rightfully has domain over a stolen pram, and see how they finally converge in a temporary armistice in order to share the newly acquired vehicle for the purposes of looting...
Bessie (Charlotte Weber), Mrs. Gogan and Uncle Peter
Fluther, who is, by now, most definitely back on the water-wagon, wonders if any pubs have been done over, never mind those shops. All this takes place on the fringes of a massive British military bombardment of the GPO, brought to life through sound, all around the audience. "England's difficulties were Ireland's opportunity" politically and economically, as illustrated at this, the street level. The fighting spills into the local streets, with some of the rebel soldiers, Brennan and Jack, forced away from the fighting, and having to tend a wounded comrade, Langon. Juxtaposed against the comedy, Captain Clitheroe now has to decide between his country and his wife; and you, the audience, are no longer a spectator.
Jack, Nora, Brennan (Brian O'Donovan) and Langon (Aiden Murphy)
What is your decision, as there are consequences either way and for both?
The rebellion may come and go, but for a long time the lives of these tenement dwellers remains unchanged as they embrace scarcity, illness and death. The abuse and mockery from Bessie from her upstairs window adds to the confusion of which side anyone is supposedly on.
Jack and Nora
It’s in the final act that O’Casey shows his hand. Now we see his characters for the souls they really are. Tragedy unites; the men, the women, a rebel on the run, all gather in Bessie's room when the British soldiers raid. There is no antagonism from either side, just resignation to fate. It was philosophical of director Hellie Turner to have the rebels now in British uniform and moustached. We are allowed to see the human side of these British soldiers, with Corporal Stoddart even finding common ground on socialism with The Covey.
Bessie, Stoddart, Uncle Peter, Covey and Fluther
Who is to blame for how Ireland finds itself in 1916, in the middle of the world war – the aristocratic empire rulers, the militant idealists, the indifferent citizens or the collision of all three?
It’s a wonderful chronicle of a world that was a century ago, but that was just one layer of Dublin society. Map that with the middle classes of James Joyce’s Dublin of 1904 in Ulysses and you get a real feel of the texture of Dublin society.
Recalling this theatre experience I can hear the sound effects which contributed so effectively to the story. This production was a great collaboration of performing arts and a very rewarding night’s entertainment. It was an intimate well-directed performance that ticked all my boxes for a memorable live theatre experience which never allowed time for the mind to drift. The pleasure of O’Casey's writing is the legacy I take from it.
Tickets for remaining shows are still available for Irish Theatre Players production of The Plough and the Stars
Where: Irish Club of WA, 61 Townshend Road, Subiaco
When: Showing until April 16
Tickets: CLICK HERE